No Angels

After the second major political party convention, I have one question to ask the American people, are you tired of the lies yet? The lies that continually spew from the mouths of our politicians; the lies that we are bombarded with from the media. And the biggest lie that is told to the American people, the biggest lie of all, is that these political candidates are great people. They are not. There is not a great person among them. Not one. You may prefer one candidate over the other in a leadership position, but none are great people. None. I’m tired of the effusive praise that our media gives our politicians. It is vomit inducing.

So, we have these conventions, which appear more like coronations of the new godly rulers of our country, and it is all farce. Does anyone actually believe that Kamala Harris is some special human being? That she has some sort of enlightenment that the rest of us do not know about? That she has this unique leadership ability? Of course not. I’m old enough to remember when Bill Clinton was coronated back in the 1990s. In the media circles, he was considered one of the most charismatic leaders we have ever seen. And now he’s been reduced to what he has always been – a punchline, a joke.

I remember in 2008 when Chris Matthews said that he felt shivers running up and down his legs as he watched Barack Obama give a speech. Basketball player, Magic Johnson, gushed over Barack and Michelle Obama’s speeches on Tuesday, saying that they were "the best political speeches in [the] history of our country." Remember, they read lines off of a teleprompter. That’s what they did. They had speech writers. They might even have used ChatGPT to craft much of their speeches. It is all a charade; it is all a facade.

Barack and Michelle Obama were presented to the world at the convention as these mythical, God-like people, the special individuals who are gracing our country with their mere presence. They’re not. They’re not any better than you and I. They’re not morally superior; they’re not more intelligent. What they are is more ambitious, more power-hungry, more cutthroat, more polished and scripted than the rest of us, but none of that makes them better, or morally superior. Can Chris Matthews or Magic Johnson name one problem that Barack Obama solved during his eight years as President? No, because there isn’t one.

During the eight years that Obama ran the country, were we living in a utopia? Were the roads paved in gold? Was the country flowing with milk and honey? The country was plagued with many, many problems that Obama was unable or unwilling to solve. And those problems still persist today. We, as a population and a citizenry, must stop worshiping these people. The only people whose lives that Barack Obama’s presidency improved were those of his families and his political donors. And that’s it. And yet we still worship them.

There’s nothing real about anything that we witnessed in Chicago, and very little was real in what we witnessed in Milwaukee. And none of it, what happened in Chicago or in Milwaukee will have any impact on how this country will be governed for the next four years. It’s an illusion; it’s a delusion. And sadly, we play along with it. We get caught up in it. We allow it to determine how we vote.

These aren’t great and wonderful people who came down from the heavens to save us. These are not messianic figures, and they’re not supposed to be. They’re supposed to be normal everyday citizens, not much different from you and I, not any more special from you and me. There’s not one person who gave a speech in Chicago at the Democrat convention this past week who is better or morally superior to the rest of us, and there wasn’t one last month at the Republican convention either. It is ridiculous for any of us to expect that there would be or that we would apply that criterion to anyone who is asking to be our leader.

Kamala Harris, the nominee of the Democrat party, formally accepted the nomination on Thursday at their national convention and did not clearly layout her platform. She is not running on a platform. She is running on an image. It is all smoke and mirrors. And American people fall for every single time. Four years ago, we were told that Joe Biden was a gentle grampa who loves our country and wants to unify us. He is one of the most divisive, mean-spirited Presidents that we have ever had who has been selling out our country to our enemies for 40 years to enrich himself and his family.

These are not good people. They should not inspire tingles up anybody’s leg, only chills down our spine. Every election is always choosing the lesser of two evils. These people are the worst among us. We call out Tim Walz for his claims of stolen valor, rightfully so, but there are examples of stolen valor throughout American politics. Kamala Harris tells the American people that “building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” and she will create “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and a chance to succeed,” but for the past four years, she has been fully in bed with the rich against the average American. She opened the border to millions of illegal immigrants which drove down wages, decimated the middle class and enriched her billionaire donors – that’s stolen valor. Every false promise that these politicians make to the American people, is stolen valor.

In the Federalist Papers, James Madison wrote, “If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

The assumption that we need a government is an admission that no one, even those who want to govern, are angels. We have no angels running our country; we have no angels in our country. And not only are those who govern us not angels, in many cases they are the worst among us. They are the greediest; they are the most power hungry; they are the most duplicitous; they are the most disingenuous; they are the least trustworthy; they are the most corrupt. You can’t get to the top of the political pyramid in this country without being all those things. And if you are all of those things, you will never be obliged to control yourself. And, as is human nature, the people who are most ravenously hungry to govern everyone else, have the least ability to control themselves. This election is not about whether or not you will be screwed, it is about who is the one that gets to screw you.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.